I wonder how founded the neo-Victorians' fear of terrorism (voiced by Hackworth to his daughter) would turn out to be. It's probably a matter of perception because this world seems to be in perpetual upheaval.

Nano will become more affordable, the incumbent great phyles will make their feed lines cheaper and try to control some other elements of the process. They have some lead in design and could try to lock down sources of energy.

Not directly related to the Seed:
The Mouse Army will have to make room for themselves. The Primer AI has plenty of disruption potential. They could make converts in any phyle that doesn't offer good prospects for education.

Yeah, I wondered the same thing. It seems like it will lead to an absurd arms race, with pretty much every wealthy community getting nuked pretty quickly. What would Bud from the first chapter do with access to any technology he wanted?

Or, from the opposite tack, why didn't this happen already. There's already portable feedstock (on the boats), unrestricted compilers on the black market, and cookie cutters. That seems to be counterbalanced by phyles as a stability factor, and some magitech scanners (the constable seems to use one on the kids) around the richer areas.

Also, there's lots of potential for near-mindcontrol tech (the cult-like phyles with dead-eyed people, the drummers' neural kit), but I'm not sure that's such a great boon to stability either (Rainbows End notwithstanding).

I can imagine it turning society completely upside down. While there's currently black market feeds, illegal tapping, and so on, almost unrestricted access to power of that level would create a world where very little is certain. In the "now" of the book, the homeless have free access to food and clothes, but those are the homeless in the cities. The plenty offered by the feeds doesn't seem to cut into rural China very much, so I guess it doesn't cut into rural India or Africa, either. Seed technology distributed far and wide has the potential to lift any group with the ability to access it out of poverty and into authority - but rapidly, without a society growing up organically, without checks and balances. The potential is definitely there for a return of warlords and nation-states growing up in months and falling apart equally as fast.

My understanding was that when Nell and folks pulled Miranda out of the drummers' circle, they prevented the final computation that they'd been working years to perform. Of course, that was a temporary setback as the info is all still there, they just need to crunch the numbers from scratch again.

Just finished the book and I'm still kind of unsure.. what exactly is seed technology? What I took from it was that it was an unregulated self-contained matter compiler.. it takes control away from (the victorian phyle?) and gives it back to the individual peasants and allows them to invent/create things like the Primer.

I imagine the internet being Seed Technology and regulated internet being Victorian Phyle Regulated Feeds and Matter Compilers. If the internet were to be regulated, innovation would be stunted.. and outdated technology like paid television services wouldn't have to compete with piracy by making better methods of delivery.

Would there be some kind of boom in innovation with the Seed technology? An evening of the playing field maybe.

Perhaps yes, but the way Stephenson frames it, the Seed technology is kind of like the internet + 3D printing + infinite raw material extractor. So it also makes geopolitical security impossible; anybody who wants to can make a nuke or a stealth bomber or whatever.